Beauty In Ruins: Six Days In Cuba

This was an extraordinary experience, the kind that jolts you out of the way you live. The wreckage of Havana is like nothing I’ve seen: old European grandeur in Caribbean colors, crumbling, patched together, home to people who have endured that terrible regime, scraping by on ingenuity and black-market trade, crowded in mansions-turned-tenements. Here, to begin, is a photo essay of what we saw. A photographer’s paradise: all those old American cars and brightly-painted buildings; the people; tobacco leaves hanging to dry; a restored mansion reflected in the doors of a derelict apartment building; in one particularly desolate room, a caged monkey in the background shadows. Philip took the picture of the crypt with one coffin-drawer missing.

Following this photo essay is my four-part series on our Cuban trip. Read it here, or find the link at the end of this post.